Facebook will struggle to make the next leap (IMHO, of course) because there's a disconnect between how users want to use it, and how Facebook wants/needs you to use it.
Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.
Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with everyone. People are learning that's a lot of work.
The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- has to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.
Facebook's user model changed completely when it introduced the news feed. Before that, users spent a lot of time "curating" their profile pages with favorite books, movies, etc., while updating status only occasionally ("dbot is ..."). Visiting someone's page was more like going over and knocking on their door. You would learn a lot about that person and what they've been up to.
Enter the news feed - which was hugely unpopular at first - and is more like walking into a public square, with ads, vendors, and people on soapboxes. Some people don't like to be so public in the way they share, and other people's interesting stuff gets lost in the crowd.
The Facebook of today isn't the one I signed up for, which is fine, but also explains why I use it less now.
This is probably a generational thing, but I don't care about being watched. If I am, that information doesn't go on Facebook, in an email, in a text, and perhaps even not in a phone call.
Facebook is getting impersonal without a competent list/circles system. I find myself texting or messaging content to people more than posting it on my wall because I want to be selective about who views it.
Sometimes these are stories about the cute girl I talked to at Starbucks or a service I'm loving. Sometimes it's a personal story with little branding value. But I naturally have both types of conversations and so don't see the mutual exclusivity between encouraging conversation and getting data.
Similarly, the problem with friending everyone goes away with a decent lists/circles concept - I add a lot more people on Google+ (granted, I don't post anything there. But I'd like to).
I disagree about Facebook potentially struggling because of this disconnect. Facebook can continue to grow by steering users toward doing what Facebook wants while intermittently rewarding them with what users want. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rein...
Addiction is not proportional to the quality of the user experience.
Agreed. I think G+ could beat Facebook here as they don't need to directly monetise the service and can provide more of the platform people want. Whether or not they can get to a tipping point of users however is another question.
For all of you wondering "Can I really give up Facebook?" the answer is an emphatic "Of course, stupid." You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.
The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite-all event listing.
Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.
Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.
Ignoring your patronizing, insulting tone for a bit, somehow I doubt it's that easy for most. If you're addicted to something (and I mean really, truly addicted), and it has negative consequences on your life, the answer is always "Well just stop it doing it, then". However, people do not work that way, and it's at the very least naive to assume it's that simple.
>You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.
Applies to Twitter, email, SMS, basically any communication method ever. The fact that becoming addicted to a communication medium can have a negative impact on your life is not a valid argument against said communication medium, because it applies to all of them.
>Facebook is not communication.
What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?
>replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology.
If you've never been emotionally impacted by a social interaction which did not occur with the person standing right next to you (i.e. via technology), I daresay you are either leading us on, or are not much of a communicator to begin with.
Oh boy another internet "experiment" when someone gives up $technology and ends up saying absolutely nothing in their post. I sure do love reading these pretentious pieces of "intellectual" prose.
In fact I shall start an "experiment" myself to see if replacing every instance of "experiment" in these kind of articles with "controversial decision" to see if they read better. I mean it's as if people use the word "experiment" to justify being avant-garde.
Except in this case it's not even a controversial thing. People are leaving facebook for tonnes of reasons (fad has died, not finding its uses any more, don't want to be tied with a system that hoards personal data and sells them off to companies etc). Leaving Facebook isn't an edgy thing to do; not before and not now. Anyone I knew that announced that they're "leaving facebook" end up being rather smugly obnoxious when tech news headlines say "facebook did some things that people don't like. boooo facebook!" saying they "knew all along" and they were obviously smarter and more superior than the regular "tech weenie" still on their facebook.
We all know what the result of this "experiment" is going to be. "My life was significantly improved thanks to not using facebook. Just as I thought! Aren't I clever?". There's no point denying it because that's what they're going to say. Just like I said I'll replace "experiment" with "controversial decision". I already know that I'm going to say "Nope. The posts were not better at all. Told ya!" because I know that when it's something I dislike in the first place I'm going to have a visceral reaction to hate it rather than say doing an ACTUAL experiment which doesn't have this cognitive bias.
And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!
Maybe that's how it came off, but if we look past the "look at me and my controversial decision masquerading as an experiment!" layer, and focus on his reasoning behind the decision: can you relate at all? I can.
"Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook" is one of the phrases I've found myself and my friends saying over the past couple of years, and sometimes I don't like hearing it, even from my own mouth.
Nevertheless, announcing it publicly as an "experiment" - it's debatable whether this has any value or point.
> And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!
I think that was supposed to be ironic. I think. Regardless, that's how it came off to me too. I still have no Facebook account, and I'm not getting one. If you're unhappy just leave, no need to make a big fuss out of it.
I deleted my Facebook account about 2 years ago. Want to know how it has changed my life? Well, it really hasn't. Sometimes I don't hear about parties / events, but it's usually just an event that I'd either hear about anyway, or would be uninteresting to me in some way. Other than that, no life-changing epiphanies, no extra productivity, no increased level of smugness. Absolutely nothing has changed, and nobody cares. The author of the article may be concerned, thinking their life will change drastically or they will drop off the face of the earth and have to claw their way back to the top of their perceived social food chain, but they'll learn over time that their presence on facebook also does not matter, and they'll have to find another way to tell the world about their thoughts, and hope that people will sign up for an RSS feed to know when they've made new blog posts.
Another week another post about someone leaving facebook.
There is nothing interesting or novel in these posts. All that happens is that the people who have also left facebook find validation in seeing someone else do it so they up vote their story to the front page.
I don't know if it's about individuality or some perceived minority of 'non-facebook' users wanting to band together, but the fact that someone has left facebook is uninteresting.
In addition to this it's made worse by the articles acting as if it's some crowning achievement when all they're doing is limiting their methods of interacting with other people.
> I want us to talk. I want a personal email. I want to find a way to share photos in a way that encourages us to talk about them with each other.
Surely you can do this with or without Facebook.
Maybe I'm a unique snowflake but Facebook to me is exactly the opposite of that: it's a way to give a quick (often meaningless) insight into my life, what I'm thinking or what I'm doing. It's a way to share something that maybe someone will be interested in, but probably not. If I share something to Facebook it's not because I want all my friends to see it, it's because I think those that might see it might find value in it and it represents what I'm doing/thinking/enjoying. If I want someone to see something or engage with me in conversation I send them a message.
Facebook isn't a replacement for "normal" communication between friends, it's an extension. The only reason anyone would want to see complaints about someone's life falling apart is the same reason people watch train wrecks of car crashes. They don't care about the individual, they care about the spectacle. Using any one->many communication platform for complaints about life seems misguided.
Exactly. If it replaces anything, it's because it is more efficient at it. This is all anecdotal, I know...
Since Facebook, my email inbox is almost devoid of "RE:RE:FW:FW" broadcast messages.
I still get plenty of email from family and friends, but they are more selective in what they send. Things that are personal, or detailed, or very specific to me.
I still use my phone a lot, but spend less time telling people how great (or not) my weekend was. If they want to know, they can look. If they want details, they call and ask.
As I see it, the seeds of this user's disappointment were planted as soon as she starting gaming the system: "my posts became more and more filtered as the 'Friend' list increased. Now, they were getting the facade, the highlights because I donned the 'happy' mask. My closer friends were still catching the true story through instant messaging, text messaging and phone calls..."
The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in the back of my mind say: no social algorithm can ever optimize its results to take into account how people will modify their behavior in response to the algorithm itself.
Her point still stands. I've been Facebooking since the start, so I don't necessarily alter my behavior much, I just use it to keep up with friends, post interesting tidbits about my life, and try to have real conversations happen.
I still see the same problems. When I talk to people, it's always "oh yeah, I saw on Facebook that you got a new job," etc. etc.
I went back and looked through my old e-mails from right before Facebook was becoming popular, early 2004. I once sent out one of those "My e-mail address is changing. Oh btw how are you?" e-mails to my whole list, and got back around 50 genuine responses that turned into conversations. Not "broadcast" style conversations, not public conversations, but real honest person-to-person human communication. It was brilliant.
I realized that I had completely lost that. If I was doing it today, I could send the same e-mail but people would send nothing back; it would just be "Thanks" because they already know everything else there is to know about my life, and I theirs.
It's a very strange and new way of connecting to people. On the one hand I have some deep insights into the lives of friends I might not otherwise talk to, or even those I do; on the other hand, I miss the humanity of one-on-one conversation.
I'm yet undecided if this is a good thing. But overall, I think the article overblows the affect this has on relationships. Personally, I sort of like it. All the trivial stuff is known already. No one cares where you work or what you're doing anymore, they want to hear how you're doing and how your life is really going. It negates some shallowness and small talk. Not necessarily bad.
But it is enormously complex. We still don't know how society will change as people become more connected in so many ways, but we do know it will change. Some might say it's the next level in our evolution; collaborative social evolution is the next step since biological evolution can't keep up. It'll be a fun ride.
I would just like to say that that has absolutely nothing to do with anything by Gödel or Turing. There definitely can exist machine learning algorithms which continually adapt, and I see no technical reason why you couldn't try and model human agency as well. The work by Gödel and Turing you're thinking of is about _formal_ systems such as logic or computer programs, and while it is very common for people to turn (i.e., abuse) their results into a metaphor with seemingly broader implications, this is actually a mistake; their proofs simply don't hold under those more general circumstances.
My problem with fb and the reason I don't use it is simple: principal. I understand the model, and oblige with google (though not g+ as it is pretty quiet in my neck of the woods). But to not only give them the value of my data but also have them go around changing things like registered email without so much as a heads up is a slap in the face. It's like a conceited bus monitor that just goes ahead and "does what's best for me". I'm an adult; I know what email address I prefer to use.
Not only that, but the utter lack of transparency is concerning to say the least. There is this monstrous set of data--PII--that this company holds and who's to say the bus monitor doesn't all of a sudden decide that's it's best for me if they provide this data to Experien. Or to the justice dept.
The real problem is that people are addicted to distraction. Fb offers this droves. So much so that not only are people more than willing to hand over their data, they are willing to hand it over to someone who thinks you don't even deserve to know when they make sweeping changes to which parts of that data are displayed to the world.
I've seen comments such as "How do you know someone doesn't use Facebook? Because they'll tell you".
As if the primary reason you're expressing your dislike for the service in a discussion about it, is because you wish to proclaim smug superiority.
I think it's important for those who dislike the current platform, and are concerned about the future ramifications of it, to speak up in public forums. To state openly that they don't use Facebook for reasons of principal and also, because Facebook's actions have spoken louder than words numerous times and in my opinion, to continue to use the service is like staying with an abusive partner.
I saw the email thing as a non-issue - if you're looking at my info on FB, then the easiest way to contact me is on FB. It doesn't bother me that people aren't referred to my Gmail account instead.
Aside from the fact that this post is mostly pointless, it's also totally misinformed.
The OP started off by stating his reasons for dropping FB in this "experiment".. namely losing touch with the people for which he originally signed up under.
But he clearly doesn't engage with them if he's not seeing their updates.
Your social graph needs fine tuning. It's like any good bayesian filter, it learns over time what interests you. You can of course give it a push in the right direction by putting people in acquaintances, or hiding specific people from your timeline. (People in your acquaintances don't show up as often in your newsfeed).
This post just shows that you most likely don't understand the full feature set of Facebook and how to best optimize your social graph (not that this is your fault). Facebook has some of the best machine learning for figuring out what is relevant to me. I'd probably argue that you click on too many memes and don't interact with your friends as much if this is what it is serving you.
Don't drop Facebook, just learn how to use it.
I personally don't use Facebook for interacting with that many friends. I have about 96% of my friends as acquantiances. I have a small set of about 10 people as friends, and I subscribe to about 100~ people.
My newsfeed is so rich with really good content.
I don't want to 'optimise my social graph'. Especially given it used to work properly and feed me the relevant content that I wanted about a year ago.
You can try defend the social graph, how much Facebook has done to improve it and so on, but for a lot of people it doesn't actually achieve what it used to, and that's an issue.
I don't know why you have so much hate for the comment you made but I couldn't agree more. Facebook is a tool, all tools need to be guided by yourself, they never just work. Equally one tool will not work for everyone so sometimes you have to adapt that tool.
People commenting it's just a money making machine, where do they make money off me? I don't click on anything I don't want to and I'm not forced to buy stuff.
I log into Facebook, see a picture of my friends baby, I comment, we have a laugh then I arrange to go round and see them. I don't interact any more or any less than I would over the phone etc
I see updates from the people I want to see updates from, if someone writes a load of crap all the time, I just filter them out.
I never understand all the hate people have for Facebook, constant jibes about privacy. If you as a person are putting information on Facebook that is that private then you are the idiot, not Facebook. If you don't want people to see private pictures of your children, simple, don't upload them!
Everything needs a revenue stream of some sort, does everyone think Apple do what they do because they want to make everyone happy??
Back shortly, just going to check out my friends wedding pics that everyone else uploaded and tagged them in.
I've gone "old school" (trying to connect to people in 'old fashion' ways) on many somewhat prolonged occasions and it doesn't work. It's a reflection of society not my particular grouping of friends.
I spent a year writing many handwritten letters. People loved receiving them but seldom, if ever, returned the favor. I try and try again to meet with my friends to catch up (ie, going for coffee). Almost never happens, and when it does it's a chore to actually set up. Instead, it has to be an 'event' and it should be 'social'. I text my friends and they respond rather quickly...because I know if I call, many times they don't answer.
Of course, all this means is that the LCD is either me or society.
I think it's a rational trend. Our direction has been towards more "omniscient/passive" forms of information, where you can update at your own pace, and others consume that information optionally. Doing this is cost-effective and allows people to prioritize their contacts by reading their feed occasionally, rather than by doing "pavement pounding" to make calls and arrange dates.
In doing this we miss out on some deeper conversations, but I think we gain on balance because it allows people to _choose_ which conversations they want to pursue. That's the key thing here - if you aren't feeling a benefit from socializing, you aren't motivated to do it. Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that most people are finding each other boring, even if they're friends...
The anecodte the poster gives is spot on and huge. There have been many times I've thought "I wonder why I don't hear from this person anymore" and it was simply a matter of Facebook no longer prioritizing their posts in my news feed.
Just because someones post isn't "liked" or clicked on in some way doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's a passive form of communication.
I don't know if this is just my perception, and maybe Facebook doesn't prioritize things in the news feed. Regardless, it's a UX question that needs to be asked by their team.
I don't know why everyone takes Facebook so seriously.
Well, actually I do but I don't want to dive into a long comment about how it's a voyeuristic, social panopticon and how easy it is to project your insecurities onto it. Well, I have a small and strange solution to staying in contact with your friends, do what I do: remove all your actual friends from your newsfeed.
When you see them, you won't already have eagerly instantiated things to talk about, you won't jaw off about some article they posted about the latest bath salt murder -- you'll actually catch up and connect in genuine conversation.
The site only has as much power as you give it, posting a long diatribe about how it has no power over you anymore because you deactivated is legitimizing its power over you.
I have to agree with the sentiments here: it seems to me that my Facebook feed is much less useful than it was about a year ago. I don't know what they've done, but it's really not good.
I think people put too much emphasis on Facebook and what perceived problems it is 'suppose to solve' in their lives. You get out of it what you put it into it, just like anything else (mostly). If you don't feel connected with your friends, it's not FB's fault. FB to me isn't designed to make my connections with friends stronger, it's designed to keep lingering friendships going.
On a side note, why is it so important to declare that you are no longer using or on Facebook. This isn't limited to the OP either. I've met people in real life, who take great pride in not using FB anymore. I find it in the tech & podcast world too. It's a strange type of snobbery, between 'those in the know who aren't on facebook' versus the 'sheep who are on facebook'.
Well, I am no longer using brand name nasal spray. It wasn't fulfilling my life I like I thought it was supposed to. I used it like the bottle says too and while it does what it says it's supposed to, it's not what I want.
Oh, thats easy. Because there is a huge group of people that will view you as "off the norm" if you don't use Facebook. Which is snobbery as well. Every time i ride the bus, I hear the word "Facebook" at least once. So, the thing itself is a hot topic, so why not talk about it, even if you are not using it?
Many of the complaints could be resolved with more transparency on Facebook's part. The frustrations seem to be generally focused on managing communication: incoming and outgoing, an issue of curation.
The problem is, despite Facebook having many tools to calibrate one's communications, Facebook is still a blackbox. We click the appropriate Account Settings radio button and like the good scientists we are, wait to see what happens. The fact of the matter is, we are pulling a lever and hoping it is attached to some mechanism on the other side.
The same is true of Google and SEO.
Odd that obfuscation is the hallmark of our internet experiences.
Facebook is defective by design as a social network. It's for profit driven, privacy abusing and etc. and etc. It's a pity that it became a virtual monopoly. Same bad as happened with Windows on the desktop.
So just because you don't have the proper settings on your news feed, you're quitting facebook altogether.
I agree that facebook is a lot less personal than it used to be. Personally, I rarely update my facebook status or stare at the newsfeed. I use facebook to connect with "friends" whose phone number or e-mail address I don't have and to join or create events.Those two situations are perfectly well handled by facebook.
Yes, I too had the similar problem. I was missing out on updates from my brother while being bombarded with stupid gifs. But as pointed out in another comment it's just one day I had to sit for an hour and put everyone who I don't speak on phone regularly as acquaintances. Problem solved!
It was a bit hard for me to do this though, nearly took an hour.. so here are two suggestions
1) Brute force: option to mark everyone as acquaintances in one go and then de-select the people back to friends.
2) More automated: Facebook should make a module where if a person allows the app access to the phonebook, it somehow recommends a list of people who are important to me based on my frequency of calling/speaking them offline. I know privacy conscious people would absolutely scream in horror so this is why it should be opt-in only.
P.S. 3) Oh and timeline still sucks. It is just too hard to read, there ought to be a way to going back to the simple news feed.
[+] [-] tatsuke95|13 years ago|reply
Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.
Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with everyone. People are learning that's a lot of work.
The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- has to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.
[+] [-] dbot|13 years ago|reply
Enter the news feed - which was hugely unpopular at first - and is more like walking into a public square, with ads, vendors, and people on soapboxes. Some people don't like to be so public in the way they share, and other people's interesting stuff gets lost in the crowd.
The Facebook of today isn't the one I signed up for, which is fine, but also explains why I use it less now.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|13 years ago|reply
Facebook is getting impersonal without a competent list/circles system. I find myself texting or messaging content to people more than posting it on my wall because I want to be selective about who views it.
Sometimes these are stories about the cute girl I talked to at Starbucks or a service I'm loving. Sometimes it's a personal story with little branding value. But I naturally have both types of conversations and so don't see the mutual exclusivity between encouraging conversation and getting data.
Similarly, the problem with friending everyone goes away with a decent lists/circles concept - I add a lot more people on Google+ (granted, I don't post anything there. But I'd like to).
[+] [-] brlewis|13 years ago|reply
Addiction is not proportional to the quality of the user experience.
[+] [-] malarkeyking|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neutronicus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|13 years ago|reply
The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite-all event listing.
Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.
Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.
[+] [-] Karunamon|13 years ago|reply
Ignoring your patronizing, insulting tone for a bit, somehow I doubt it's that easy for most. If you're addicted to something (and I mean really, truly addicted), and it has negative consequences on your life, the answer is always "Well just stop it doing it, then". However, people do not work that way, and it's at the very least naive to assume it's that simple.
>You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.
Applies to Twitter, email, SMS, basically any communication method ever. The fact that becoming addicted to a communication medium can have a negative impact on your life is not a valid argument against said communication medium, because it applies to all of them.
>Facebook is not communication.
What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?
>replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology.
If you've never been emotionally impacted by a social interaction which did not occur with the person standing right next to you (i.e. via technology), I daresay you are either leading us on, or are not much of a communicator to begin with.
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
Facebook tries to pretend its more. Its not.
If I want to hold private dialogues with people from across the country - long, intense, and thoughtful - I prefer email.
[+] [-] Wilya|13 years ago|reply
On the other hand, maybe you've missed a dozen of other events, where you could have had your share of "real" communication.
I despise Facebook as a company, and its many shady schemes, but I have to admit, it's a very efficient tool for connecting people.
[+] [-] Afal|13 years ago|reply
In fact I shall start an "experiment" myself to see if replacing every instance of "experiment" in these kind of articles with "controversial decision" to see if they read better. I mean it's as if people use the word "experiment" to justify being avant-garde.
Except in this case it's not even a controversial thing. People are leaving facebook for tonnes of reasons (fad has died, not finding its uses any more, don't want to be tied with a system that hoards personal data and sells them off to companies etc). Leaving Facebook isn't an edgy thing to do; not before and not now. Anyone I knew that announced that they're "leaving facebook" end up being rather smugly obnoxious when tech news headlines say "facebook did some things that people don't like. boooo facebook!" saying they "knew all along" and they were obviously smarter and more superior than the regular "tech weenie" still on their facebook.
We all know what the result of this "experiment" is going to be. "My life was significantly improved thanks to not using facebook. Just as I thought! Aren't I clever?". There's no point denying it because that's what they're going to say. Just like I said I'll replace "experiment" with "controversial decision". I already know that I'm going to say "Nope. The posts were not better at all. Told ya!" because I know that when it's something I dislike in the first place I'm going to have a visceral reaction to hate it rather than say doing an ACTUAL experiment which doesn't have this cognitive bias.
And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!
[+] [-] basicallydan|13 years ago|reply
"Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook" is one of the phrases I've found myself and my friends saying over the past couple of years, and sometimes I don't like hearing it, even from my own mouth.
Nevertheless, announcing it publicly as an "experiment" - it's debatable whether this has any value or point.
[+] [-] unimpressive|13 years ago|reply
I think that was supposed to be ironic. I think. Regardless, that's how it came off to me too. I still have no Facebook account, and I'm not getting one. If you're unhappy just leave, no need to make a big fuss out of it.
[+] [-] sirrealle|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|13 years ago|reply
There is nothing interesting or novel in these posts. All that happens is that the people who have also left facebook find validation in seeing someone else do it so they up vote their story to the front page.
I don't know if it's about individuality or some perceived minority of 'non-facebook' users wanting to band together, but the fact that someone has left facebook is uninteresting.
In addition to this it's made worse by the articles acting as if it's some crowning achievement when all they're doing is limiting their methods of interacting with other people.
[+] [-] citricsquid|13 years ago|reply
Surely you can do this with or without Facebook.
Maybe I'm a unique snowflake but Facebook to me is exactly the opposite of that: it's a way to give a quick (often meaningless) insight into my life, what I'm thinking or what I'm doing. It's a way to share something that maybe someone will be interested in, but probably not. If I share something to Facebook it's not because I want all my friends to see it, it's because I think those that might see it might find value in it and it represents what I'm doing/thinking/enjoying. If I want someone to see something or engage with me in conversation I send them a message.
Facebook isn't a replacement for "normal" communication between friends, it's an extension. The only reason anyone would want to see complaints about someone's life falling apart is the same reason people watch train wrecks of car crashes. They don't care about the individual, they care about the spectacle. Using any one->many communication platform for complaints about life seems misguided.
Maybe https://everyme.com/ would fill the void he has in his life.
[+] [-] itgoon|13 years ago|reply
Since Facebook, my email inbox is almost devoid of "RE:RE:FW:FW" broadcast messages.
I still get plenty of email from family and friends, but they are more selective in what they send. Things that are personal, or detailed, or very specific to me.
I still use my phone a lot, but spend less time telling people how great (or not) my weekend was. If they want to know, they can look. If they want details, they call and ask.
[+] [-] cs702|13 years ago|reply
The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in the back of my mind say: no social algorithm can ever optimize its results to take into account how people will modify their behavior in response to the algorithm itself.
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
I still see the same problems. When I talk to people, it's always "oh yeah, I saw on Facebook that you got a new job," etc. etc.
I went back and looked through my old e-mails from right before Facebook was becoming popular, early 2004. I once sent out one of those "My e-mail address is changing. Oh btw how are you?" e-mails to my whole list, and got back around 50 genuine responses that turned into conversations. Not "broadcast" style conversations, not public conversations, but real honest person-to-person human communication. It was brilliant.
I realized that I had completely lost that. If I was doing it today, I could send the same e-mail but people would send nothing back; it would just be "Thanks" because they already know everything else there is to know about my life, and I theirs.
It's a very strange and new way of connecting to people. On the one hand I have some deep insights into the lives of friends I might not otherwise talk to, or even those I do; on the other hand, I miss the humanity of one-on-one conversation.
I'm yet undecided if this is a good thing. But overall, I think the article overblows the affect this has on relationships. Personally, I sort of like it. All the trivial stuff is known already. No one cares where you work or what you're doing anymore, they want to hear how you're doing and how your life is really going. It negates some shallowness and small talk. Not necessarily bad.
But it is enormously complex. We still don't know how society will change as people become more connected in so many ways, but we do know it will change. Some might say it's the next level in our evolution; collaborative social evolution is the next step since biological evolution can't keep up. It'll be a fun ride.
[+] [-] andreasvc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obituary_latte|13 years ago|reply
Not only that, but the utter lack of transparency is concerning to say the least. There is this monstrous set of data--PII--that this company holds and who's to say the bus monitor doesn't all of a sudden decide that's it's best for me if they provide this data to Experien. Or to the justice dept.
The real problem is that people are addicted to distraction. Fb offers this droves. So much so that not only are people more than willing to hand over their data, they are willing to hand it over to someone who thinks you don't even deserve to know when they make sweeping changes to which parts of that data are displayed to the world.
/rant
[+] [-] panacea|13 years ago|reply
As if the primary reason you're expressing your dislike for the service in a discussion about it, is because you wish to proclaim smug superiority.
I think it's important for those who dislike the current platform, and are concerned about the future ramifications of it, to speak up in public forums. To state openly that they don't use Facebook for reasons of principal and also, because Facebook's actions have spoken louder than words numerous times and in my opinion, to continue to use the service is like staying with an abusive partner.
[+] [-] scott_s|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planetguy|13 years ago|reply
For school teachers, perhaps the reason might be principal.
[+] [-] richardv|13 years ago|reply
The OP started off by stating his reasons for dropping FB in this "experiment".. namely losing touch with the people for which he originally signed up under.
But he clearly doesn't engage with them if he's not seeing their updates.
Your social graph needs fine tuning. It's like any good bayesian filter, it learns over time what interests you. You can of course give it a push in the right direction by putting people in acquaintances, or hiding specific people from your timeline. (People in your acquaintances don't show up as often in your newsfeed).
This post just shows that you most likely don't understand the full feature set of Facebook and how to best optimize your social graph (not that this is your fault). Facebook has some of the best machine learning for figuring out what is relevant to me. I'd probably argue that you click on too many memes and don't interact with your friends as much if this is what it is serving you.
Don't drop Facebook, just learn how to use it. I personally don't use Facebook for interacting with that many friends. I have about 96% of my friends as acquantiances. I have a small set of about 10 people as friends, and I subscribe to about 100~ people. My newsfeed is so rich with really good content.
[+] [-] nicholassmith|13 years ago|reply
You can try defend the social graph, how much Facebook has done to improve it and so on, but for a lot of people it doesn't actually achieve what it used to, and that's an issue.
[+] [-] yuvadam|13 years ago|reply
Facebook is not about "helping you connect to your friends", it's about buying eyeball-time and pumping commercials into your brain.
Any person that has not been completely brainwashed can see the fallacy in this kind of system.
[+] [-] AznHisoka|13 years ago|reply
Or you can just take control of your relationships and nourish them the old fashioned way: calling, email, face to face, etc.
[+] [-] chrislomax|13 years ago|reply
People commenting it's just a money making machine, where do they make money off me? I don't click on anything I don't want to and I'm not forced to buy stuff.
I log into Facebook, see a picture of my friends baby, I comment, we have a laugh then I arrange to go round and see them. I don't interact any more or any less than I would over the phone etc
I see updates from the people I want to see updates from, if someone writes a load of crap all the time, I just filter them out.
I never understand all the hate people have for Facebook, constant jibes about privacy. If you as a person are putting information on Facebook that is that private then you are the idiot, not Facebook. If you don't want people to see private pictures of your children, simple, don't upload them!
Everything needs a revenue stream of some sort, does everyone think Apple do what they do because they want to make everyone happy??
Back shortly, just going to check out my friends wedding pics that everyone else uploaded and tagged them in.
[+] [-] crag|13 years ago|reply
I regret accepting old high school/college friends (who I haven't' seen in 25 years), army buds, and family members I didn't even know I had.
Now I post, maybe once every 2 weeks. Usually something safe - like about the current game I'm playing. I don't dare get personal on FB now.
[+] [-] antidoh|13 years ago|reply
The irony.
[+] [-] prostoalex|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] personlurking|13 years ago|reply
I spent a year writing many handwritten letters. People loved receiving them but seldom, if ever, returned the favor. I try and try again to meet with my friends to catch up (ie, going for coffee). Almost never happens, and when it does it's a chore to actually set up. Instead, it has to be an 'event' and it should be 'social'. I text my friends and they respond rather quickly...because I know if I call, many times they don't answer.
Of course, all this means is that the LCD is either me or society.
[+] [-] chipsy|13 years ago|reply
In doing this we miss out on some deeper conversations, but I think we gain on balance because it allows people to _choose_ which conversations they want to pursue. That's the key thing here - if you aren't feeling a benefit from socializing, you aren't motivated to do it. Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that most people are finding each other boring, even if they're friends...
[+] [-] lukejduncan|13 years ago|reply
Just because someones post isn't "liked" or clicked on in some way doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's a passive form of communication.
I don't know if this is just my perception, and maybe Facebook doesn't prioritize things in the news feed. Regardless, it's a UX question that needs to be asked by their team.
[+] [-] untog|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicky0|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kliment|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godisdad|13 years ago|reply
Well, actually I do but I don't want to dive into a long comment about how it's a voyeuristic, social panopticon and how easy it is to project your insecurities onto it. Well, I have a small and strange solution to staying in contact with your friends, do what I do: remove all your actual friends from your newsfeed.
When you see them, you won't already have eagerly instantiated things to talk about, you won't jaw off about some article they posted about the latest bath salt murder -- you'll actually catch up and connect in genuine conversation.
The site only has as much power as you give it, posting a long diatribe about how it has no power over you anymore because you deactivated is legitimizing its power over you.
[+] [-] chris_wot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristiandupont|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] telepoiss|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanderEarth32|13 years ago|reply
On a side note, why is it so important to declare that you are no longer using or on Facebook. This isn't limited to the OP either. I've met people in real life, who take great pride in not using FB anymore. I find it in the tech & podcast world too. It's a strange type of snobbery, between 'those in the know who aren't on facebook' versus the 'sheep who are on facebook'.
Well, I am no longer using brand name nasal spray. It wasn't fulfilling my life I like I thought it was supposed to. I used it like the bottle says too and while it does what it says it's supposed to, it's not what I want.
[+] [-] Argorak|13 years ago|reply
Your nasal spray, however, is not a hot topic.
[+] [-] jakejake|13 years ago|reply
Just stop checking your Facebook page and start hanging out more with friends in person. No need to be so dramatic about it.
[+] [-] tgrass|13 years ago|reply
The problem is, despite Facebook having many tools to calibrate one's communications, Facebook is still a blackbox. We click the appropriate Account Settings radio button and like the good scientists we are, wait to see what happens. The fact of the matter is, we are pulling a lever and hoping it is attached to some mechanism on the other side.
The same is true of Google and SEO.
Odd that obfuscation is the hallmark of our internet experiences.
[+] [-] shmerl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MortenK|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbrizzi|13 years ago|reply
I agree that facebook is a lot less personal than it used to be. Personally, I rarely update my facebook status or stare at the newsfeed. I use facebook to connect with "friends" whose phone number or e-mail address I don't have and to join or create events.Those two situations are perfectly well handled by facebook.
[+] [-] superasn|13 years ago|reply
It was a bit hard for me to do this though, nearly took an hour.. so here are two suggestions
1) Brute force: option to mark everyone as acquaintances in one go and then de-select the people back to friends.
2) More automated: Facebook should make a module where if a person allows the app access to the phonebook, it somehow recommends a list of people who are important to me based on my frequency of calling/speaking them offline. I know privacy conscious people would absolutely scream in horror so this is why it should be opt-in only.
P.S. 3) Oh and timeline still sucks. It is just too hard to read, there ought to be a way to going back to the simple news feed.